A Star Is Born

No Overnight Success, Sally Murphy Is Enjoying Her Climb To The Top

Frankfort Junior High School was casting its Christmas show in 1974 and she had been called upon to take a part.

"I was thinking, `There is no way I want to do that. It is stupid,' " she recently recalled. "Then they asked for a replacement, and for some reason I changed my mind. I don't know why. That was the last time I didn't want to be on stage."

Since then, she has moved from stage to stage, locally, nationally and internationally. Since agreeing to play that toy soldier in 7th grade, Murphy has gone on to act in professional theater, movies and television.

"Sally has the natural qualities that play well on film, but she has the technical skills to grace the stage, and those are two very different things," said Mike Maggio, a director at Chicago's Goodman Theatre who directed Murphy in several shows there in the 1980s.

Murphy, a 1980 graduate of Lincoln-Way High School in New Lenox, is appearing on Broadway in a revival of the classic musical "Carousel." Murphy plays the lead female role of Julie Jordan, the sweet millworker romanced by brooding carnival barker Billy Bigelow.

"This `Carousel' is different because our production, I feel, is an honest interpretation of the original work," she said of the play, which recently was extended to run through December. "The productions that audiences are used to, I feel, glossed over major elements of the story. I definitely do not feel that we have imposed a `concept' onto this piece of work.

"I feel like our work is growing and growing, and I look forward to the show every night."

"Sally Murphy ... is a lovely Julie Jordan, willful and almost mysteriously self-aware," wrote Vincent Canby in a New York Times story about "Carousel" last month. "How did a young woman of her background ever become so reckless?"

As for Murphy's background, she is the only child of Edward and Pat Murphy. She grew up in Chicago's Auburn-Gresham neighborhood, where she started by doing skits with neighborhood friends. But her mother fondly remembers another performance during a kindergarten graduation ceremony with about 30 classmates.

"She started to sing. She was supposed to sing and she sang. She drowned everybody out. She didn't know she was doing it. They said sing, and she was singing. She monopolized that little choir, which is very unusual for her because she never drew attention to herself. And then I realized she had lungs ... that she could sing," Pat Murphy said.

Starting at age 6, Murphy took piano lessons in a home where music played an important part. She said her parents-her dad was an electrician and her mother a social worker and substitute teacher-have been the biggest influences in her life.

"When I was little, my mom would give me a bath. We would sing scales and arpeggios and songs from musicals. I think about that every day when I'm doing warmups for `Carousel.' She put music into my life. I was singing all the time because of her," Murphy said.

Murphy calls her father "a performer at heart," although he hasn't had any acting parts. "He is kind of outgoing," she said. "I think part of that is in me when I go on stage. He has this booming high voice and I think that is in me, too. I think I am half of each of them."

In 1973, the Murphys moved to Frankfort. After her appearance as the toy soldier, she was in school shows, including as Isabelle, Scrooge's old girlfriend, when her classmates staged "A Christmas Carol" in 1975.

"The beginning was the shows in junior high school," Murphy recalled. "I loved to sing and we got to do solos. It was fun to act, too."

At Lincoln-Way, she starred in the music department's shows and the theater company's plays.

"She took all the roles we gave her and she did extremely well in them," said David Saxe, one of her high school drama coaches and now a social studies professor at Penn State University.

"It is hard to predict which students are going to hit it. They all had aspirations to make it. Sally had the work habits needed as a freshman," said Saxe, a former professional actor in the Chicago area.

At Lincoln-Way, Murphy was in "Ask Any Girl" and "Flowers for Algernon." One of her most memorable performances was in "The Miracle Worker," acting as understudy for Val Michener's Helen Keller. As the first act ends, water is thrown in Helen's face. On one night, "Helen" was hit with the pitcher, cutting her forehead. During the intermission, Saxe and John Shields, the other drama coach, readied Murphy to go on.

"She did not want to go on. I told her, `You have to,' " recalled Saxe.

"Mr. Shields was very diligent about preparing the understudies scene by scene and we did all of act one," Murphy recalled. "But then we started to run out of time and never rehearsed act two."'

During the intermission, she found a crowd around Michener, who was getting help for her bleeding forehead.

"I was thinking, `This is so terrible. What are we going to do?' Then all of sudden it dawned on me, I'm the understudy," she said.